During the 1990s, the government of Madhya Pradesh enacted the first ever law in India on right to education and launched Siksha Guarantee Yojana.
Under this scheme, if any village had 40 children of school-going age and there was no school there or within a kilometre, they could demand a primary school and it was incumbent on the District Collector to open a school in that village within 24 hours without any sanction or approval from any authority.
Any building of either the Panchayat or any state department in the village would do to start the school.
If there was no such building, the verandah of the residence of headman of the village or even a treeshade would do.
As for a teacher, the scheme envisaged any young man or woman of the village who had passed Class VIII or more would suffice.
Reportedly, some 40,000 such schools were started in the state at that time. In addition, the state government also allowed appointment of casual teachers to tide over largescale vacancies. Such teachers were recruited locally, mostly without following any rigorous procedure and were paid a fraction of what the regular teachers received.
This practice was extended to colleges in later years to fill vacancies. In MP in those years, of various statistics collected from the field by the education department, one was about the number of buildingless and teacherless schools and most grotesquely, the number of buildingless, teacherless and studentless schools.
For several decades now, many states in India have followed a similar practice in both opening of schools and colleges and in recruiting teachers.
Also, entrepreneurs, mostly builders, have entered the education field and opened schools and colleges everywhere.
Most of these private institutions rarely have quality teachers, partly because they pay less but also because good and trained teachers are difficult to come by.
As a result of such approach, we have in India today millions of young men and women who have certificates but no proper jobs since most of them possess neither the commensurate knowledge nor any skills demanded by employers. Such education gives the students an illusion of being educated and a sense of entitlement to jobs because, in India, for long, passing school or college has been considered enough eligibility to be appointed to jobs.
The reality is vastly different. Most of these youth are found inadequate for jobs on offer in the market. Unemployed or grossly under-employed, it is not surprising that a resurgent political party could enrol some 10 crore members and become the largest political party in the world. Or during the Shravan month, one finds large hordes of kanwariyas aggressively trekking along all possible roads blocking traffic and often making themselves serious threats to law and order. Besides being members of political parties, most of these young men and women also constitute the bulk of our labour force today, largely unskilled and incapable to learn, and undisciplined to boot. School certificates, degrees, social media, cheap television and cinema stories and emotionally charged religious and political discourses give meaning to their lives and create for them an unreal and escapist world.
Most of our public institutions, schools, colleges, hospitals, police stations, government offices, legislatures and law courts were designed to deal with a reasonable size of population. But the population has overtaken and overwhelmed these institutions. A visit to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi would starkly illustrate what the numbers have done to it. Even airports designed just a decade back have started bursting at the seams. Roads, highways, flyovers, hill stations, places of pilgrimage and wildlife parks are cracking under these numbers. Law and order have suffered the most because the police and the criminal justice system have completely failed to keep pace.
There is also staggering unevenness in this population, inequalities and diversities of impossible proportions. These are not the attributes of a democratic and liberal society. Political scientists and public intellectuals have to rethink our institutions and decide if public institutions for population exceeding a 100 crore and more and with excessive diversity would need totally different models of governance. Therefore, when men are beaten up to death in streets for petty or no ostensible crimes with unimaginable cruelty, we have to remember that the perpetrators might have come out of such education-guarantee schools or so-called colleges of half-teachers.
For such rudderless multitudes, anything can be a trigger. It is from these people that we would progressively have more and more of our public representatives, media persons, cinema and TV entertainers, civil societies, religious gurus and their foot soldiers, teachers, traders and businessmen, government servants, lawyers and magistrates. Having unleashed these large numbers on India today by wilful and progressive abdication of our duties in the last six to seven decades, we have brought this crisis on ourselves. The rise of all this is dangerous but these are not the outcome of ideological aberrations; in fact, the ideological aberrations are the end product of our total inability as a society to remodel our institutions and governance to cope with the overwhelming tide of population and its demands.
satyanandamishra@hotmail.com